Human trafficking victims see a Pillar of Hope rise

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Hope is the theme throughout this safe house for girls run by Pillars of Hope, a nonprofit that fights sex trafficking, in Contra Costa County, on Thursday. The goal of the organization, founded by Debra Brown, is to provide a safe nurturing home where young women will get their GED, realize their full potential and receive job training programs. The home is opening on Sunday May 21 and girls are scheduled to move in next week. (Susan Tripp Pollard/Bay Area News Group)

ANTIOCH — For seven years, Debra Brown has been working to build a safe haven for human-trafficking victims, guided, she says, by a near-death experience and a divine message.

After her organization, Pillars of Hope, suffered a setback with a planned location, her first home for sex-trafficked women will open Sunday.

“We had a house last year and were two weeks away from opening it, but the location was compromised. Too many people were talking about it,” Brown said. “We had to pack everything up and put it in storage.”

Brown has learned from her experiences. She now has nondisclosure agreements with staff and volunteers so that the new location, wherever it is, can’t get out to the public and to anyone in a victim’s past who is trying to drag them back to that life.

For Brown, the home is a critical step in the path to healing for victims. Without a place to stay while they get counseling, training for a future job, and save up for the transition to public life, it’s likely they will return to the source of income they knew, Brown said.

The Bay Area is one of three hot spots, along with Los Angeles and San Diego, that are responsible for 80 percent of human-trafficking activity in the state. With easy access to international travel and a thriving tourist industry, the Bay Area has become a magnet for human traffickers. The average age for girls entering into trafficked prostitution or pornography is 12 to 14 years old.

P.J. Gatling, of Concord, a volunteer with Pillars of Hope, adds her spin on making sure the green room at a two-story safe house, is read for girls in Contra Costa County on Thursday. (Susan Tripp Pollard/Bay Area News Group)

A lack of available victim housing often leaves underage victims of sex trafficking housed in juvenile detention. Contra Costa County currently has only one facility with six beds for underage human-trafficking victims.

With the opening of the Pillars of Hope house, Brown has doubled the number of beds for victims, but she doesn’t plan to stop there.

Her end goal is a 10,000-square-foot facility that will house more than 30 people and is projected to cost $15 million to $20 million. She knows she will achieve it, because the vision, design and guidance on it came via divine message, she said.

“You will facilitate the opening of a safe house for human-trafficking victims,” was the message Brown describes as being sent to her by God.

Brown said that she had never been a particularly religious person before, even describing herself as “anti-religion” and “anti-church.”

In 2009, Brown was undergoing a spinal fusion operation when an artery was compromised. She was brought back from cardiac arrest twice. During this time, Brown remembers an out-of-body experience where she floated above her family members, the doctors and all else and wondered why she didn’t die.

For a long time, Brown didn’t tell anyone but a close friend about the experience. One year later, to the day, she was sitting in her hot tub and “sentences began downloading in my head.”

She was given instructions to build a safe place for victims of human trafficking.

“I didn’t even realize what human trafficking victims were at the time,” she said. “I’d seen the movie ‘Taken,’ which was based on a true story.”

Not long after, Brown said, she had another vision and began drawing a schematic for the facility that would provide shelter for 36 victims.

“I knew this was coming, I didn’t even know how to draw a map before, and this was so amazing that my hand knew what to draw,” Brown said.

Since then, she has worked tirelessly on achieving the goal set before her. Friends and colleagues describe the former X-ray technician as relentless and driven.

“She just doesn’t stop,” said Amy Lynch of ARM of Care, a nonprofit art therapy organization that cares for sexually exploited youths. “The people she’s networked with, the resources she’s created, a large bandwidth she’s created over the last few years. She’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the girls that are in her care get what they need.”

Lynch works with victims in the juvenile halls and sees many “end up back on the streets, in foster care or back in ‘the life’ as they call it.”

Over the past seven years, Brown has raised approximately over $250,000 through anonymous donors, fundraisers and women’s organizations. She hosts two larger fundraisers a year: A crab feed, normally in February or March, and a black tie event at the Oakhurst Country Club in Clayton, set for Nov. 11 this year.

Shortly, Brown is expecting a $100,000 donation from an anonymous donor that has already donated $60,000 to Pillars of Hope.

The Pillars of Hope house will cost approximately $308,000 a year to operate. Brown is not worried, though, because she believes that the project has a strong backer.

“God definitely told me this house is a go, so I know he won’t let it fall. It’s not Deb Brown’s plan, it’s God’s plan,” Brown said.

Debra Brown, founder of Pillars of Hope, looks over plans for a 10,000-square-foot facility with her public relations officer, Janice Gomez. (Aaron Davis/Staff)

Brown doesn’t think that her mission is just to care for only victims of sex trafficking. She was told to build a facility for victims of “human trafficking”.

“Pillars of Hope will be multi-faceted,” Brown said. “There will also be a labor-trafficking house. There are victims in nail salons and massage parlors. A trafficker has them convinced that they will kill their family back home.”

A recently released report from the Polaris Project identified 36 categories of human trafficking in its The Typology of Modern Slavery. Types range from escorts and domestic workers to carnival workers and remote interactive sexual acts (the report can be read at http://polarisproject.org/typology-report).

Brown knows that the work is just starting and knows that it is an uphill battle. While the number of hidden, trafficked humans is difficult to determine, national and international agencies agree that the population of modern slaves continues to increase.

There is a positive note to the data on human trafficking: Community members are engaged in the fight against human trafficking. According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, 27 percent of all tips in California were from community members.

To learn to recognize the signs of human trafficking, visit polarisproject.org/recognize-signs. If you need help or would like to report any tip, great or small, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888. Or text HELP to: BeFree (233733).

Pillars of Hope will host a summer painting class on June 3 at the Galleria at Vidrio in Pittsburg. Registration costs $50, and 100 percent of the proceeds go directly to support sex-trafficked victims. To learn more or to donate to Pillars of Hope, visit www.pillarsofhope.us.

Aaron Davis reports on East Contra Costa County for the East Bay Times. He has worked for papers throughout the Seacoast of New Hampshire, as well as in Queens, New York and in Amarillo, Texas. Send tips to 408-859-5105 or to aarondavis@bayareanewsgroup.com.

Otto Warmbier was arrested in January 2016 at the end of a brief tourist visit to North Korea. He had been medically evacuated and was being treated at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center when he died at age 22.